Riding around in Holland

Isaac has been attending the peuterspeelzaal across the street. Pretty much all two and three year old Dutch kids attend a neighborhood nursery school for a morning or an afternoon a few days a week (each parent decides how often). He loves it, especially the autos (pronounced ow-toes in Dutch)--the riding toys. There are cars and fire trucks you sit on and push with your feet, lots and lots of tricycles that you pedal, a couple of scooters, and--the piece de resistance--a bicycle with training wheels. This appears to be a favorite item, especially among the three year olds. I've never seen a bicycle before at a preschool but, hey, this is Holland!

Yesterday Isaac had an American friend over. "Hey! Let's play autos (pronounced in the Dutch way)!"

The poor girl was utterly confounded. "What? What do you want to play?"

"Autos! Autos! We have two of them in the backyard."

"Ow-toes?" she asked, visibly perplexed.

"Yeah! Come on!"

My US History teacher has lived in the Netherlands and taught at the American School of the Hague for a long time. Today in class he told us how there used to be a big meadow in the lot next to the school building. It was fenced. Early every morning, a truck would pull up, towing a row of trailers. The driver would open the gate, drive into the meadow, close the gate, and open each trailer to let out the cows riding inside.

All day, the cows stood around in the meadow, eating grass. Each evening, they lined up to wait for the truck with trailers to return and pick them up.

I recognized the system: we used to live near some fields in the Hague city center, and they, too, were regularly filled with and emptied of cows.

Now that meadow next to our school has been turned into a rest home (in Dutch, a verpleeghuis). My teacher finished his story by pointing out at it and showing us which room he wants to move into when he finally goes senile.

A guy in my grade is organizing a schoolwide service project. We're all supposed to donate money and he'll send it to contacts of his in Thailand, who work at a school that was damaged by the tsunami a couple years ago. The idea is, and I'm very serious, that our money goes to buying snacks for some orphans who don't get any allowance.

It's not that they're hungry. Oh, no. They get curry and rice, three meals a day. It's just that they have to watch as the kids who still have their parents buy treats for themselves, while the poor orphans are stuck with their plates full of the same old food.

Is it insensitive of me to find the initiative laughable?

Ruth, not Annette

Today, it snowed!
I saw chicken prints in the snow outside our house. Maybe a chicken followed us here from Khartoum.

In Dutch, the word for "clean" and "beautiful" are the same

On garbage day, I noticed a truck parked by the garbage cans we and our neighbors had put out. "That's a mighty small garbage truck," I thought to myself. Then I realized it was no garbage truck at all but a small van with some kind of water tank attached. A city maintenance worker was cleaning out an empty garbage can with a spray of water.

Reminded me of the time, when we lived here before, that I passed a city worker perched on a stepladder at the corner of the street next to the sign that said the name of the street. He was scrubbing the sign with Windex and a squeegee.

Ruth, not Annette

I was sitting in the library, innocently doing homework, when a girl I kind of know from my English class walked in, holding hands with a boy. They came and sat down in the seats immediately next to mine. They chatted about schoolwork for a minute, chemistry and English. Then all of a sudden the girl said, "We need to talk. About us."

The boy got a little defensive. "What is there to say?"

"Are we dating, or what?"

"Look, two drunken hook-ups don't mean we're dating."

Right about here, I started melting inconspicuously into the carpet.

"Ugh! Then what do they mean?!"

"I guess I'm just not down with the whole commitment thing right now."

"That's such a lame excuse!"

"Well, maybe so, but it's the truth."

"You are such an #&!" Girl left.

Boy sat still with his hand over eyes. I hid behind my books.

Eventually, the boy left, too, and I, bemused, continued my homework.

Strangely enough, about 10 minutes later, they came back. Together. They sat in the same seats. They held the same conversation. Chemistry. English. Two drunken hook-ups. It was incredibly surreal, something out of a fantasy novel.

This went on for my entire free period. At one point (maybe the fourth time through) when the boy was sitting alone with his hand over his eyes, I asked him, "What is this?"

He said, "I wish I knew."

To Do List for you--from Ruth (who is still having trouble posting)

hey.there.

For You To Do:
Look at pictures of my new baby cousin at this blog. Know that I won the honor of having the first look at photos by guessing correctly the time of birth.
Pat yourself on the back for stopping by despite our apparent disappearance from the face of the earth.
Tell me whether we should change the title of the blog (the URL is set in stone, though).
Offer your opinion on the lonelygirl15 videos. (Having lost the super-slow Sudanese internet connection, I can now explore YouTube at will!)
OK, now that I'm done telling you what to do (Gosh! See if you ever come back!).

Ruth makes an appearance! (after many frustrating technical difficulties)

A major downside to this move was having to leave my beloved school in Khartoum. When we lived in the Netherlands before moving to the Sudan, I went to International School of the Hague (ISH), which is government-sponsored and follows the UK's educational systems. Its facilities (when I was there, anyway) were kind of grungy, but it was a good place to be. About half an hour away, though, is the American School of the Hague, which is not government-sponsored, and is (to quote... myself) "waaaay expensive." ASH, as it is known, is huge and beautiful and shiny. It has SmartBoards instead of whiteboards, color-coded hallways, card-operated lockers, and even Spirit Week, for heaven's sake. (I've never before gone to a school that had Spirit Week. Or cheerleaders, for that matter.) ISH kids always thought of ASH kids as spoiled and stuck-up.
Now that we're back in the Netherlands, guess my new school.
The major advantage that ASH has over ISH, I have found out, is its library. ASH's library is amazing! Meaning it has lots of new books, all the Newbery and Printz winners, themed displays, graphic novels, and modern-looking but very comfy chairs. On my first day, I came in and asked the librarian if I could get American Born Chinese, since it had just won the Printz award. She was impressed... (Thank you, librarian bloggers here and here and here and here! I owe you!)The librarian is pretty much my best friend by now. Especially because she owns the Archie McPhee Librarian Action Figure and Jane Austen Action Figure.

I can't post!